Silver Shoal Light/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
JOAN RUES HER BARGAIN
THE cries of a flock of kittiwakes wheeling noisily over the lighthouse woke Joan the next morning. She wondered for a moment where she was, till she breathed the keen salt air which tingled through the window; then, remembering everything, she lay back luxuriously. The flat gray of the sky was fading to a tender rosiness, which was shot across with broad streaks of orange as the sun floated up. Cold and hard the sea-line met the glowing clouds, a band of steel color. Sailing toward the sun, a four-masted schooner slipped along the horizon; to the north, a wisp of smoke marked a vessel hidden over the earth's edge. The dawn-wind stirred the curtains at Joan's window and whispered about the room. Two big sea-going tugs—business-like craft in sober, workaday dress—passed close to the lighthouse on their way into the bay. As Joan watched them, their lights, ghostly in the dawn, went out suddenly; she saw men moving about the decks and heard the steady swish of the water about the bows. She dozed again happily; then, finding with a start that the sun had climbed far above the horizon, decided that it must be time to get up.
Joan threw on a shimmering blue-green kimono and shook out her dark hair. While she stood before the little mirror, the door was suddenly pushed open and in the glass she saw a child on the threshold, gazing at her in complete surprise. She could see only his head and shoulders—a crisp tumble of bronzed hair, an eager, intent face tanned to a mellow golden-brown. Then she turned and saw what the glass had not revealed, that he leaned rather hard upon crutches and that one brown leg was held rigid by a steel apparatus. Half Joan's pleasure vanished. She was thankful that she had asked to stay only one week.
"Well?" she cried finally, for her own gaze had faltered under the child's eyes. They were steady gray eyes, the color of the sea on a windy day, and they had not once left her face.
"Well?" she repeated.
"Are you a mermaid?" asked the little boy. "I wanted you to say something first, so I wouldn't frighten you away."
"Of course I'm not a mermaid!" Joan retorted. "How could I be?"
"I'm sorry," said the child. "You see, I didn't know anyone was in here, and when I saw you I thought you might be one. You're so shimmery, you know, and your hair's so long, only it's not green. And they almost always have a comb and a glass in their hand." He hesitated. "We always hoped one would come near the Light," he went on, "but I did wonder how you could have climbed in at the window. But if you aren't a mermaid, who are you?"
"I'm Miss Joan Kirkland," she said.
"That's a very nice name; I shall call you Joan. May I come in while you do up your hair? Mudder always lets me watch her do hers." He sat down in the rocking-chair with some difficulty and clasped his hands over his best knee. "My name is Garth Pemberley. I'm rather sorry you're not a mermaid," he said.
"You don't really think there are such things as mermaids, do you?" asked Joan.
The child gazed at her with an expression in his serious eyes that for a moment reminded her of Robert Sinclair's sober look.
"Of course!" said Garth. "Fogger and I nearly saw one once. That is, we were rowing up by Bird Rock one afternoon, and a mermaid was caught by her hair. Just as we came along, she got off. It looked rather like green sea-weed, but mermaids' hair is like that, you know."
"Certainly it was seaweed," said Joan, thrusting in hairpins.
"I don't think so, because I saw her scales glitter under the water as we rowed up. Fogger would have poked his oar down, but we were afraid of hurting her."
"Did your father think it was a mermaid, too?" asked Joan.
"Of course!" said Garth. "There used to be such lots of them before the Light was here. They used to play in the moonlight all over the Shoal. That's one reason why it's called Silver Shoal, you know, because their scales shone so in the moonlight. But the Light has frightened them all away. Are you going to stay out here long?"
"Not very long," Joan replied emphatically.
"I'm sorry," said Garth. "People don't come here very often. I'd like you to see all the nice things, Joan." He slid suddenly out of the chair, got his balance, and turned toward the door. "I must go to my breakfast now," said he, inclining his curly head graciously. "Good-bye!"
"As though he expected me to disappear out the window and never be seen again!" thought Joan. "I must go to my own breakfast."
As she finished dressing she could hear his difficult progress down the steep stairs.
Mrs. Pemberley looked up from the golden cream she was skimming as Joan came to the kitchen door.
"I'm sorry that Garth burst in on you this morning," she said. "I forgot to tell him you were there. He thought you were a mermaid."
"So it seems," said Joan rather remotely. "May I help you?"
Jim Pemberley ran up from the pier just as the others sat down to breakfast.
"Good-morning, Miss Kirkland!" he cried. "There was such a nice breeze that I've just been over to the mainland and fished your trunk out of the express-office. The old baggage-master gives me anything I ask for, and I said I'd send the check over today. We might have had trouble in finding the office open later; it closes after the Pettasantuck goes out. 'Lo thar, Skipper!" he added, rumpling up his son's hair as he passed him.
"Thank you so much!" murmured Joan.
She had half thought of leaving that day, after all. The prospect of being shut in such very close quarters with a small boy, for even a week, had taken the edge off her delight of the evening before. But now that Pemberley had actually written for a permit and had brought her trunk, she really could not fly off for no obvious reason.
She was rather silent during breakfast, and the conversation was, for the most part, between Garth and his father.
"Fogger, what's a sea-banana look like?"
"A what?" said Jim. "(Would you mind passing me the butter, Miss Kirkland?) A which?"
"A sea-banana; I think I saw one."
"A sea-banana," said Pemberley, buttering a piece of bread, "is the fruit of the Sea-Bananyan, or push-cartius oceanus. How big was this one?"
Garth laid down his spoon and indicated a length of about six inches between two brown hands.
"And it was long and thin," he said; "it looked something like a cigar."
"That's probably what it was," said Jim; "a sea-gar. Give Miss Kirkland some more toast, Elspeth."
Joan was laughing in spite of herself; and, because Garth was laughing, too, gloriously and deliciously, she found to her annoyance that she could not stop quite as soon as she wished.
When Joan went into the kitchen to help Mrs. Pemberley with the breakfast things, she almost ran into a lanky person on his way out, bearing a plate and cup in his hands. He was of indeterminate age, sandy-haired and lean-jawed, with mild blue eyes and an anxious expression.
"That's just Caleb," Elspeth explained, as she supplied Joan with a tea-towel.
"And who is Caleb?" Joan inquired.
"A kindly shadow," Elspeth replied, "brought up on a rule of 'don't speak 'less ye 're spoke to, and then no more 'n you have to.' He's a noiseless, unseen cog in the machinery of Silver Shoal Light."
"What a paragon!" said Joan.
"He's a benevolent Lob-lie-by-the-fire," Elspeth continued; "he's a Blessing. In short, he does all the chores (except cleaning the Light, which is Jim's job, of course) and he is the 'competent person' demanded by the Regulations, who is left in charge when we go sailing or row in for the mail. Just now he was going out to his little domain over the boat-house. He spends his entire spare time, so far as we can see, reading the Reports of the District Lighthouse Inspectors from 1870 to date. His one hope is to become a keeper some day, but he once told Jim that he hadn't enough 'git thar' to try for it!"
It entered Joan's mind to wonder again what had made a lightkeeper of Jim and had brought Elspeth out to this windy little house on a rock.